Furious shopkeepers have blasted Bristol City Council after bungling workmen painted double yellow lines outside a shopping parade by mistake after nine months of roadworks. Council contractors were putting the finishing touches to a £1.7million project to reconstruct St Peters Rise, next to Headley Park, on Tuesday (September 6).
But instead of reinstalling the parking bays that were there before the roadworks started last December, traders at the Bishopsworth end of the road watched in horror as apparent new restrictions were painted on the road stopping customers from pulling in. The local authority has admitted this was done in error and contractors ETM were back on site on Thursday (September 8) to burn off the yellow lines.
It comes just weeks after traders vented their frustration about the time it was taking to complete the works, which should have finished in May but suffered three months of delays, for which the council apologised. Dave John, 64, who has run his self-named butchers for 20 years, said the yellow lines blunder was “just another nail in our coffin” following years of lost trade from covid and then the overrunning roadworks.
Read more: South Bristol shopkeepers hope for an end to Headley Park headache
He said: “Before the work we had three bays for cars outside our shops but these were replaced with double yellow lines. They have completely messed this up. It is incompetence.
“The whole thing has been long, drawn-out and disruptive. This sort of thing has to be stopped. The council and its contractors need to be more efficient.
“We are small businesses. I had no money from the Government during covid, and when we do ask for help, everyone goes against us. It is like two steps forward and one step back all the time.
“This would not happen in Clifton, but it does in south Bristol. I am so frustrated. The people of Headley Park have been absolutely shafted.”
Dave said the contractors turned up to remove the lines on Thursday morning and that one of them had told him that the council had given them the wrong instructions. He said they were burning off the paint only, rather than digging up the new road surface, and reinstalling the parking spaces but that the yellow lines would probably still be visible as a result, which he said was not good enough.
Bishopsworth Tory Cllr Richard Eddy, who lives nearby, accused the council of making a “stupid mistake”. He said: “If the council wishes to implement single or double yellow lines, there have to be several rounds of advertised public consultation and an expensive traffic regulation order applied for.
“This can take years and clearly this didn’t happen in this ludicrous case. Clearly, bureaucracy has gone mad here and no-parking lines have been marked outside these shops on busy St Peters Rise, a key shopping parade.
“Not only has the council subjected these shopkeepers to delayed months of resurfacing work, which naturally impacted their customer trade, but now it seems determined to destroy their remaining business by a bureaucratic bungle.” A city council spokesperson said that the lines were a contractor error and that it had sent them back to fix it on Wednesday, although this did not happen until the following morning. They declined to comment further.
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